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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

You think they don't know they're doing it wrong? Of course they know they're doing it wrong. They do it anyway because they think it's worth it to them.

I'm curious about your statement that "I just care that they do it legally and the two countries know about it." I understand the first part, but why do the two countries need to know about it? If the country they're entering has decided it would be OK for people to enter without telling them, what would be wrong with that? And why should the country they're leaving from have to know anything?

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I'm not exactly sure who gets the info every time my passport gets scanned but I would imagine both the country I'm leaving and the country I'm entering know about it. I've never been out of country for more than a few weeks at a time (and never was it to move there) but I find it hard to believe that moving to a different country would be less strict than just visiting for a couple weeks.

Right, that's often how they do it, but you seemed to be saying that this was something that should always be done. Maybe I misunderstood.

As for how countries actually do it, there are a lot of borders out there where you can legally cross without telling anybody, like the borders in the Schengen area (possibly excluding France at the moment, not sure what's going on with that) or the border between the UK and Ireland. Certainly, tracking is the norm, but it's not universal.

I see how that came across differently than I meant. And I actually don't really care what the other country does. If they don't care to know when people are coming and going that is between them and their people. One time (maybe 20 years ago) I was driving around the German countryside and accidentally drove into Austria. There was no indication that I had done so (at least none that I had seen). I was surprised how easy it was to do it by accident.

The Schengen area formed about 20 years ago, so depending on exactly when that was, you may have encountered the freshly opened border.

Oddly, there are some places with no real controls but where it is not legal to simply cross. Some of the US/Canada border is like that. You can just wander across in certain places, but you're required to present yourself to an immigration official if you do.

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